Cockpit

The Cockpit is a club and live music venue in Leeds, England. It is joined to The Rocket Bar and it's sometimes difficult to tell which door to go through for which club night. The club nights are mainly of the indie/rock/punk/alternative variety (just like the bands that play), and there's also a gay night.

There are three rooms to the Cockpit/Rocket, each of them has its own bar.

A cockpit machine is one in which the player is fully enclosed inside the machine, and plays the game sitting down. These are usually driving or flight simulator games, but a few other titles have had cockpit versions released as well.

The first cockpit games were actually electromechanical games, but this form factor didn't really become popular until the late 1970s and early 1980s. During that time period many games were available in cockpit format, with titles such as Sinistar, Turbo, Star Wars, and Pole Position being especially popular with gamers.

Most cockpit games differ from their upright counterparts only in the shape of the machine, but some games (such as Turbo and Pole Position), had other differences as well (the Turbo cockpit had functional gauges, while the Pole Position cockpit had a brake pedal that the upright lacked).

Cockpit machines began to fall out of favor after the early 1980s. They were largely replaced by a new style of ride on machines, that had a seat, but did not enclose the player, almost all modern racing games are like this.

When purchasing a cockpit machine you should always carefully examine the machine to make sure it has never been sawed in half, and then nailed back together (this was actually a real problem with these games). Then check the inside of the game, as cockpit titles tended to have higher vandalism rates, because the enclosure shielded the players from the watchful eyes of arcade employees.

Common cockpit titles (such as Turbo), tend to be cheaper than the upright versions. This is mostly due to the sheer size of the machines. But rarer (or simply more popular), cockpit titles demand premium prices. Expect to pay top dollar for a Sinistar or Star Wars cockpit. A few games had cockpits released in very limited numbers, like Blaster (only three were made), and Missile Command (only 100 were made). The prices for these rare games can easily approach those of a decent used car.

Cockpit is a 1975 novel by Jerzy Kosinski. It follows the adventures of a man, identified only as Tarden in a single part of the book, in a manner that gives the reader the impression that that's not his real name. The book is written in a sort of stream of consiousness style, going from anecdote to anecdote without breaking stride; sometimes without even changing paragraphs.

The first-person main character goes through life on the outside of normal society, distancing himself of his own choice. He observes, and occasionally becomes a part of, the lives of others. Then, eventually, he does some little, simple thing which changes that person's life dramatically, forever. The book jumps around in time, from his childhood, to his nominal career in a government bureaucracy, to the later stage of his life living not quite on the run, but not quite within the law, either.

Our main character is not a nice person. He does not go around and do right. He's not evil either; he just seems to like to change people. And he does, over and over, until the brilliant ending, which I won't say anything more about.

In case you hadn't noticed, I like this book. It's quite gripping, and is written with an intensity that I have rarely seen.